CHAPTER VI

SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS

Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair; Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air; Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld; Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld. Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been; Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen! Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun, And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run. _Scottish Ballad._[52]

When James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his--as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle, and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.

Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that _Macbeth_ is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them. The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the freedom of the city.

Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh of that day,--the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]

Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the _Edinburgh Courant_. This must have been after his release from the State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street (so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere, and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere else,--especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it. Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Walks in Edinburgh_. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of _one vast castle_.”

Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.”

Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came in the cortège of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr. Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr. Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of “Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburgh _literati_. Here, during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of--

How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear charmer away!

who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of ideas with the author of--

Wae’s me! For baith I canna get, To ane by law we’re stented; Then I’ll draw cuts, and take my fate, And be with ane contented.

And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century Goldsmith was a medical student in Edinburgh, living, it is said, in College Wynd, and writing amusing accounts of the dulness and formality and drollery of the Assemblies. An Edinburgh tailor’s account for the year 1753, found by the late Mr. David Laing in the pages of an old ledger, allows one to imagine Goldie gracing Edinburgh in a suit of sky-blue satin and black velvet, and a “superfine small hatt” which bore “8s. worth of silver hatt lace.” Mr. Filby the tailor charged the modest sum of £3:6:6 for a “superfine high claret-coloured” cloth suit; but possibly he might have charged double that amount or half that amount with equal profit to himself, for the account was “carried over,” and no ledger remains to tell the tale.[54]

Tobias Smollett paid two visits to Edinburgh, the last in 1766, when he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Telfer of Scotstoun, in St. John Street. This street, then inhabited by some of the aristocracy of Edinburgh, still retains a distinguished look; and much of the fine old architecture remains, including Mrs. Telfer’s home, which was in the first floor of the house over the great archway through which the street is entered. This house, which was previously the residence of the Earl of Hopetoun, attracts the eye immediately by its turnpike stair, occupying the corner of the street, beside the arched entrance. Smollett was introduced by Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk to Edinburgh literary celebrities, among them Home, who had so scandalised his brother clergy by writing a play,--“The Douglas”; and, like Gay thirty years before, he haunted Allan Ramsay’s library,--in Smollett’s day the property of Alexander Kincaid the publisher. _Humphrey Clinker_ contains all Smollett’s comments on Edinburgh society, men, and manners.

Three years later, in 1769, Benjamin Franklin visited Edinburgh. He was given the freedom of the city, and was accorded the usual hospitable welcome from all the chief people of the town.

On a Saturday evening in August 1773, Dr. Johnson’s huge figure filled the doorway of the old Whitehorse Inn in Boyd’s Close, and presently Boswell, in his house in James’s Court, received the following note:--

_Saturday night._

Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being newly arrived at Boyd’s.

Boswell hurried off to welcome the traveller, and found him roaring passionately at the waiter, who had put sugar into the lemonade with his fingers. Out into the hot August evening the two friends went, and walked up the High Street arm-in-arm to James’s Court, where Mrs. Boswell waited to administer tea to her ponderous rival. “Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms,” Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other, four stories high.” Here Mr. and Mrs. Boswell invited all the people of brilliant achievement in the city to meet him,--Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Mrs. Murray of Henderland, Allan Ramsay the artist, Beattie the poet, Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, and many others; but among them was the Duchess of Douglas, “talking broad Scotch with a paralytic voice,” and Dr. Johnson showed open preference for her society. What all these people thought of Dr. Johnson is suggested by the wit of Henry Erskine, the well-known Edinburgh advocate, brother of the Earl of Buchan. After much inimitable politeness and good-humour during his presentation to Johnson, he slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand for the sight of “your English bear.” Mrs. Boswell (_née_ Montgomery, one of the Eglintoun family) was equally

witty and even more frank. She had certainly some provocation, because, as Boswell himself tells, Dr. Johnson had, among other habits, one of turning the candles upside down when they did not burn brightly enough. “I have often seen a bear led by a man,” the much-tried hostess told her infatuated lord, “but I never before saw a man led by a bear.”

Boswell not only invited all Edinburgh to meet Dr. Johnson, but took Dr. Johnson to all the sights of the city. On Sunday, after they had attended service in the Episcopal chapel in Blackfriars Wynd, Johnson saw Holyrood; and, under the guidance of Principal Robertson, he and Boswell went over the University. Boswell also took his guest to the island of Inchkeith, and to stay with Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield for a few days, and they dined and drank tea at the old inn at Roslin, and

Went to Hawthornden’s fair scene by night, Lest e’er a Scottish tree should wound his sight.

Many of Dr. Johnson’s comments on things Scottish were quite genial; but two terse ones expressed decided disapproval. “No, Sir!” he bellowed, when some one proposed to introduce him to David Hume. And again, “I can smell you in the dark!” he grumbled to Boswell, no doubt most truthfully, as they walked through the city.

A year after Dr. Johnson’s visit there came to Edinburgh and its hospitalities another Englishman. Captain Topham cannot be called a famous visitor, but he deserves mention, both because of his charming little book, _Letters from Edinburgh, written in the Years 1774 and 1775_, and because of the artistic contrast he forms to Dr. Johnson. Captain Topham must have re-established his country’s character for good manners in the opinion of Edinburgh citizens. He had not compiled a dictionary; neither had he “kept a school and ca’d it an academy,” as old Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, said of Johnson; but he was a wide-minded man of good breeding, had been educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, had travelled, and held a commission in the Guards, and seems to have been equipped for enjoying social existence, and adding to its enjoyment by others. He was by no means sparing in his comments; his humour would make that impossible. Amid all his graphic descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” He tells of the bad inns, and here again his good-humour saves him. No swearing at the waiter without sugar-tongs, but--“Well, said I to my friend (for you must know that I have more patience on these occasions than wit on any other) there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffeehouse.” He describes the amusements,--the theatre, the assemblies and dances, the oyster cellars, the funerals, and the executions. The Kirk and devotion, the University and education, trade and the booksellers, all are spoken of. He gives a warm picture of a very friendly and hospitable town, simple in its ways and hours and incomes and requirements, but brimful of intellect and cultured love of letters and music, and peopled by a kindly, couthy race, with very strongly marked characters, dwelling together in unity at very close quarters.

The only social error Captain Topham seems to have made was when a lady invited him to an oyster supper in a cellar. He “agreed immediately,” but complains pathetically to his correspondent, “You will not think it very odd that I should expect, from the place where the appointment was made, to have had a _partie tête-à-tête_. I thought I was bound in honour to keep it a secret, and waited with great impatience till the hour arrived. When the clock struck the hour fixed on, away I went, and inquired if the lady were there. ‘Oh yes,’ cried the woman, ‘she has been here an hour or more.’ I had just time to curse my want of punctuality when the door opened, and I had the pleasure of being ushered in, not to one lady as I had expected, but to a large and brilliant company of both sexes, most of whom I had the honour of being acquainted with.”

But even Captain Topham’s amiable temper has its limits. Of two things he speaks evil,--of his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, and of a haggis.

In November 1786 Burns paid his first and famous visit to Edinburgh. He came, dejected, unknown, his mind hovering on the thoughts of intended exile; and in a moment, as it were, Edinburgh recognised him, and flashed on all her lights to welcome him and do his genius honour. There followed the most brilliant and triumphant period of all his short life. He was fêted and lionised by all ranks of society; the magnates and the celebrities, the literary and the learned, the high-born and the low-born, the fashionable and the gay, beautiful women and great men, vied with each other in entertaining this wonderful poet with the rustic garb and the dark eyes. Burns was the honoured and petted guest of every man and woman of note in Edinburgh--of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, of Sir John Whiteford, of the Ferriers at 15 George Street, of the eccentric Lord Monboddo and his “angel” daughter at 13 St. John Street, and of a hundred more. He rollicked in Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd, or, among the “Crochallan Fencibles,” listened to Dawney Douglas quavering the minor pathos of his Gaelic song, “Cro Chalien.” He stood bareheaded beside the unmarked grave of Fergusson in the Canongate Churchyard, and knelt and kissed the spot, and sent to ask if the “Ayrshire ploughman” might erect a stone to the memory of the poet to whom he owed so much. He read aloud his “Cottar’s Saturday Night” before the young Duchess of Gordon and the lovely Miss Burnet, and bewildered them with his fascination and his genius. He published his Edinburgh edition of his poems, and dedicated them to the Caledonian Hunt; and the names of all his admirers and hosts are still there--a long list of good, well-known Scottish names.

In 1786 there occurred the memorable meeting, at the house of Professor Adam Fergusson, between Burns and Scott. There was a gathering of “several gentlemen of literary reputation,” and Scott, a boy of fifteen, was present. Scott “had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him,” but, with the better manners of that period, “of course we youngsters sat silent and listened.” Burns was affected by one of the pictures on the wall, and the lines printed beneath it. He “actually shed tears,” and asked whose the lines were. None of the “gentlemen of literary reputation” volunteering the information, Scott whispered to a friend that they were Langhorne’s, and the friend told Burns, who turned to the boy with a “look and a word.” “You’ll be a man yet!” is what Burns said: and those words and that look are all the link between these two great Scottish poets, who “spoke each other in passing.”

It was not until December 1787 that Burns met “Clarinda,” the very lovely Mrs. M‘Lehose, a cousin-german of Lord Craig’s. She, forsaken by her husband, lived in a house of three rooms in General’s Entry, between Bristo Street and Potterrow. Burns had met her only once, at a tea-party gathering, before--he having met with a carriage accident and being unable to leave his lodgings--their famous “Clarinda and Sylvander” correspondence began. Clarinda possessed more than beauty, as her letters and verses show. There were many beautiful faces in Edinburgh, and Burns has immortalised them in his eulogies--Miss Burnet, Miss Ferrier, Miss Whiteford; but poor Clarinda’s verses he has mingled with his own. It is said that it was these two marvellous lines of hers that first struck him:--

Talk not to me of Love! for Love hath been my foe. He bound me with an iron chain, and flung me deep in woe.

Clarinda continued to live on in Edinburgh, and died there when nearly eighty, with a picture of the long-dead Sylvander beside her.

Of all comments on Edinburgh the best-known is Burns’s passionate salutation to the venerable city:--

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers, Where once beneath a monarch’s feet Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers. From marking wildly scattered flowers, As on the banks of Ayr I strayed, And singing, lone, the lingering hours, I shelter in thy honoured shade.

Here wealth still swells the golden tide, As busy trade his labour plies; There Architecture’s noble pride Bids elegance and splendour rise; Here Justice, from her native skies, High wields her balance and her rod; There Learning, with his eagle eyes, Seeks science in her coy abode.

There, watching high the least alarms, Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar, Like some bold veteran grey in arms, And marked with many a seamy scar: The ponderous wall and massy bar, Grim rising o’er the rugged rock, Have oft withstood assailing war, And oft repelled the invader’s shock.

With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears I view that noble, stately dome, Where Scotia’s kings of other years, Famed heroes! had their royal home. Alas, how changed the times to come! Their royal name low in the dust! Their hapless race wild-wandering roam, Though rigid law cries out, ’Twas just!

Wild beats my heart to trace your steps, Whose ancestors, in days of yore, Through hostile ranks and ruined gaps Old Scotia’s bloody lion bore: Even I who sing in rustic lore, Haply, _my_ sires have left their shed, And faced grim danger’s loudest roar, Bold following where your fathers led!

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers! Where once beneath a monarch’s feet Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers! From marking wildly scattered flowers, As on the banks of Ayr I strayed, And singing, lone, the lingering hours, I shelter in thy honoured shade.